Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/208

 194 has rather gone out of style. The young people live, and thrive, and wax scornful, and fill up chapter after chapter, to the exclusion of meritorious adults. What a contrast between the incidental, almost furtive manner in which Henry Kingsley introduces his delightful children into "Ravenshoe," and the profound assurance with which Sarah Grand devotes seventy pages to a minute description of the pranks of the Heavenly Twins. Readers of the earlier novel used to feel they would like to know a little—just a little more of Gus, and Flora, and Archy, and the patient nursery cat who was quite accustomed to being held upside down, and who went out "a-walking on the leads," when she was needed to accompany her young master to bed. Readers of "The Heavenly Twins" begin by being amused, then grow aghast, and conclude by wondering why the wretched relatives of those irrepressible children were not driven to some such expedient as that proposed by a choleric old gentleman of my acquaintance to the doting mother of an only son. "Put him in a hogshead, madam, and let him breathe through the bunghole!"